Poetry Response: Poetry in Motion

It was an explosion.
Nay, it was an expansion.
It was the birth,
In which was also written death.

It was the start of a story still in writing.
A story which could just as easily not have existed.
A species would later on term this "contingency",
A species, a member of which writes this today.

To witness it would have been agony.
To witness it would be a feat.
To witness it one would have to transcend reality.
To witness it is to witness everything.

Everything was brought into existence by it.
Everything which could easily not exist today.
Everything then is everything now.
And everything everywhere is a function of how.

Every sunrise, every sunset.
Every star to ever adorn the night sky.
Every galaxy to be a home to some wonder in this expanse.
Every species to ever marvel at the beauty around her.

It is a glass bowl waiting to shatter.
It is a glass bowl which could have shattered.
It is a glass bowl which will shatter.
It is a cosmic house of cards; one false step collapses it all.

All was written in it.
All was born with it.
All will die with it.
All is fundamentally bound to it.

 

When I was a contributor to Amateur Astronomy, my partner dared to wax poetic and it reminded me that while I generally shy away from writing poems, I do end up writing one poem a year. And since I had a creative outlet in the form of the blog, why not write that poem now? I hadn’t written a poem in 2016 thus far.

 

I started thinking about various things I could write a poem about pertaining to the universe. It was ridiculously easy given my love for the subject, but I found that just one facet would be too narrow to write a poem about; I wanted something I could describe well, and something I could connect the reader with. (It had happened too many times that the responses I received said that what I wrote about was too complicated to follow!)

 

When it comes to writing about the universe, I want to write in a way that captures everything I know about a subject. I want to do the subject justice and my full effort goes into that. My thought process while writing for the blog was the same, except this time, I was also writing for an audience. I had to ensure that my writing was being received and understood. Of course, my morals went a bit elastic as I thought, “Well, maybe if I just pique the interest of my reader, my work is done, right?” so I didn’t pay much attention to the second part of writing an article: getting the reader to understand.

 

But poetry presents a unique opportunity. I had the option to present an idea close to my heart in a few verses that may be more effective for the reader than paragraphs upon paragraphs of the same topic. What could I write about that was powerful enough to be expressed in poetry, and yet could reach the audience with its full power?

 

I decided to write about the overarching topic of the beginning of the universe, to try to communicate the power and sheer uniqueness of the circumstances that allow us to exist. Thinking about the topic got me going, and I had the poem, exactly as published, on one page of the notebook I used back then to write drafts for the blog.

 

As I wrote the poem, I lost myself in the feeling of my mind telling me everything it wanted to about the Big Bang as I wrote it down. When I read the piece, I was slightly startled it turned out pretty well, but I noticed that the word ‘it’ held different meanings in different parts of the poem. The inconsistency made me uncomfortable. I wanted to be able to answer the question, “What am I pertaining to when I write ‘it’?”

 

I ran the poem and the question by my father. He found nothing wrong with the poem, and to the question, he said, “Maybe every reader will find the answer for themselves.”

 

I pulled the ‘poetic license’ card and decided that ‘it’ could stay.

 

In hindsight, the word does bother me. But overall, I do like the poem. Despite the circumstances around me leaving the blog, I am proud of the work I did on there.